Oh, What a Night

Even when Jacoby Ellsbury is hitting homers against your team, it's possible to survive.  The Guru tells you how.

.373 Avg, 6 HR, 18 RBI, 1 SB, 1.245 OPS.

When you wake up in the morning and see this in the fantasy box score, your first instinct would be to jump up and down for joy like a Yankee fan sitting in left field on October 16^th 2003 at about 11:45pm (the Coach’s 17^th birthday, indecently). We have all had days like this. We have all had that “day” that makes you want to walk up to the closest person and tap them on the shoulder and say “Hey, guess what? I’m the man.”

Now what if I told you that was your opponent’s box score.

Crickets. Long Pause. Unfortunately, we have all had this very day as well. This is a day that makes you swear off Fantasy Baseball. This is a day that makes you say, “I hate fantasy”, “Why am I wasting my time” and the ever-popular, “His team sucks; of course he has a field day when I’m playing him.” Sad to say, days like these are just simply the reality of Head-to-Head league formats. This is the exact score line of my opponent in one of my H2H leagues. Although the week is seven days long, any one day can bury you. A day like the one mentioned above can bury an owner and have him already looking at next week’s starting pitching matchups, factoring in the losses in the standings to see where they will be at the end of the week.

Like everything, however, there is a flip side to this coin which some will never be able to experience; a side which only true winners- like those named the Guru- could even begin to explain to you. My own score line last night was to the tune of a .340 Avg, 4 HR, 13 RBI’s, 1 SB, 1.052 OPS. If fantasy baseball was televised on CBS, right about now Gus Johnson would be slipping into his Kemba Walker voice and shouting, “If you let this team stick around too long, they will burn you!”

The mark of a good team is not a team who can have a day like first mentioned above. Every owner has these days. My sister drafted a public league team based on color of uniforms and player’s names she liked and even SHE had these days. The mark of a good team is the ability to overcome these days. The ability to make it to the next day after your opponent rakes like this and still say to yourself, “I got this.” The ability to take the bullet and live to tell about it. While my line could simply be considered a huge day, it is way more than that.

It’s days like this which can be the shining moment in a season. A day that can make you know, as the great Ricky Bobby once said that you “Play for Keeps”. A great team isn’t measured by huge days, but measured by the ability to stay in matchups. A great team keeps you in every category until Sunday Night Baseball is over and you turn on Everybody Loves Raymond. A great team makes it tolerable to deal with other owners’ teams playing over their head and sticking them where it hurts the whole rest of the week. Everyone is going to watch their opponent have days like this and I am not going to lie to you, it’s going to suck. Suck big time. But with turmoil comes triumph, and if you can use the word consistent at any time when talking about your team, then the second stat line on the page will be you.

After all, it’s happened before.